Raoul Dufy, Le Marché aux poisons, circa 1905. Estimate $150,000–250,000.
Executed circa 1905, Le Marché aux poissons is a fine example dating from the early years of Dufy's Fauve period. That seminal year in the history of modern art also proved to be a defining one for Dufy's career. After visiting the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where he saw Matisse's masterpiece Luxe, calme et volupté, Dufy said, "I understood the new raison d'être of painting and impressionist realism lost its charm for me as I beheld this miracle of the creative imagination at play, in colour and drawing"
Maurice de Vlaminck, Vase de fleurs, 1908. Estimate $300,000–500,000.
Strongly influenced by van Gogh, whom he venerated, Vlaminck's Fauve canvases were stridently colored and boldly executed to such an extent that in 1907, the year of his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Vollard, he was christened "the wildest of the Fauves." Shortly afterward, however, Vlaminck would abandon the excesses of his Fauve manner in favor of a more subdued approach strongly influenced by Cézanne.
Henri Matisse, Collioure, Plage St. Vincent, 1905. Estimate $80,000–120,000.
Perhaps the most prominent of the Fauves, Henri Matisse began introducing vibrant, unaturalistic colors into his works in 1905, along with his cohort André Derain. The two spent that summer painting together in the small fishing port of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast.
Maurice de Vlaminck, Les Canotiers à Chatou, 1904–5. Estimate $1,500,000–2,500,000.
The present work depicts the Seine near Chatou, a small town located just northwest of Paris. Vlaminck, who moved to this region at the age of sixteen, was deeply attached to the local landscape which he strove to render in his paintings with the utmost intensity. It was at Chatou that one of the critical partnerships at the core of the Fauve movement began with the chance meeting of Vlaminck and André Derain in June 1900. When their outbound train derailed shortly after leaving Paris, the two artists "struck up a conversation while walking the rest of the way to Chatou, where they both lived. It turned out that they both painted, and...they agreed to meet the next day under the Pont de Chatou...with their canvases. So it was, as Vlaminck later said in his typically jocular manner, that the 'School of Chatou was created'" (John Klein, The Fauve Landscape (exhibition catalogue), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, p. 123).
Kees van Dongen, L'Horloge de la plage de Deauville, 1955. Estimate $700,000–900,000.
In L'Horloge de la plage de Deauville, van Dongen deftly captures the exciting and fashionable summer social scene at Deauville: a place to see and be seen. Van Dongen was at the center of this lively world. The artist first visited Deauville in the summer of 1913, when he stayed with his collector friends the Desjardins. Seduced by the buzz and glamour of the place, he returned almost every year of his life.
The Fauvists, led by Henri Matisse and André Derain, were a stark departure from the Impressionists who had come to occupy the central role in the Parisian art world. Introducing garish color and vivid brushstrokes, their bold new style ushered in a new era.